January 6 - January 8

Cairns to Uluru
Qantas 1859
Departs Monday, Jan. 6 - 11:25 AM
Arrives Monday, Jan. 6 - 1:40 PM

Things to see and do:

Ayers Rock
Ayers Rock Tours

Tuesday, January 6

Our flight to Ayers Rock is pretty uneventful. Travis manages to snap some nice photos of the outback and Kata Tjuta (also called "The Olgas") on his phone just before landing (don't tell Qantas that he had an electronic device on!).

Ayers Rock (or Uluru, it's Aboriginal name) is in the middle of the continent in what's called "the Red Center". All the soil in this area is red due to small traces of iron in the soil that rusts over time giving it a red tint. The only things in the area are the national park and the Ayers Rock Resort. The resort is a "village" of six or so hotels plus various shops and restaurants. There is no competition here and even the cheap rooms are far from cheap. Remember our almost-beachfront 5 bedroom and 4 bath house with a pool that we had in Cairns? Well, we traded that for a single room of cinder-block construction with two sets of bunk beds! At least it has a bathroom. They have others here that share a bath. This is living!!

While waiting to check in (everyone arrives at the same time on our flight), we immediately notice that it's really hot. At least it's a dry heat. ;-) We also start to notice that there are flies. Lots of flies. A whole lot of flies! They seem to love landing around eyes, noses and ears - and are really, really annoying. We're told this isn't even the bad time of the year for them!

After checking out our room and quickly realizing there is nothing to do in there, we go to the tour desk to book tours for Wednesday. Doug & Travis decide to make a very full day of it and sign up for a sunrise Uluru tour, an afternoon Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) tour, and a dinner called Sounds of Silence. Cliff and D.Ray decide to take it a bit easier and stick to just an afternoon/sunset Uluru tour.

With tours booked, we go to the grocery store to get a few essentials. While there, D.Ray spots "Fly Nets" and buys four of them for us. They look really silly, but really are "life" savers. They're really the only reason why we stayed sane dealing with the flies.

After spending a while at the pool to try to cool off, we head to the BBQ for dinner. The resort offers a self-cook BBQ where you buy the meat from them and they provide the BBQs to cook on as well as an all-you-can-eat salad/sides bar. We all opt for the Aussie Combo which includes kangaroo, crocodile, as well as emu and beef sausages. By evening, the flies had gone to bed and the evening was really quite pleasant, between the good food and the live entertainment.

Everyone headed to bed and somehow everyone complained about the other three snoring!

Wednesday, January 7

Our bus pick-up for the sunrise tour was at 4:45 AM. What were we thinking??? We get up as late as possible and join the other crazy people heading out to watch the sun rise over a rock.

At the sunrise viewing area, there must have been 200 people by the time the sun came up. The tour operators give people stools to sit on and provide tea, coffee, and cookies to tide you over until the sun comes up. It's a bit silly that there is this big group of people just sitting there in the dark - but we were. The sun came up and lots of pictures were taken - and then everyone leaves quickly!

We got back on the bus and the bus driver started listing out our options. There were too many of them. Our brains still weren't functioning and neither of us could process them. After about the fifth time explaining the options, we finally understood and got off the bus at the base of the rock to do some self guided walks before we took a ranger led walk at 8AM. On our self-guided stroll, we discovered that while the local aborigines consider the whole rock sacred, there are parts that are more sacred where photographs are not allowed and you can't approach those parts of the rock.

Technically you can even climb Uluru, although the aborigines ask that you don't do it (it's a sacred rock to them after all!). There's a chain up the rock to help one along. We're not interested in climbing it, but it's closed anyway. It's rarely open for climbing due to the wind, high temperatures, rain, etc. It's only open about 20% of the time, and then in the summer it will only be open between 6-8 am. The rangers don't like it being open due to the health/injury risk of the climbers and the fact that they may have to go rescue the climbers. We asked why they just don't close the climb permanently (makes sense to us!), but apparently a lot of Aussies believe it's their birthright to climb the rock and they get quite upset if they're not given the opportunity to do so. Before they came up with conditions for the climb to be open, there were a LOT of injuries and rescues, to the tune of one a week. Heart attacks were apparently quite common (some in the car park afterwards). Since they've put in the conditional opening, they haven't had an incident in the last three years. It's believe that the next climbing death will close the climb permanently.

The local aborigines have stories/lore that are told on the features of the rock. The ranger told us the tale of the Malas as we did the Mala Walk. Each of the aboriginal people theoretically can also take the form of an animal. The Malas are theoretically rufous hare wallabies. The story goes that years ago, the Malas were starting a sacred celebration. Just after starting, a neighboring group invited them to their own celebration. The Mala celebration couldn't be stopped once started, so they declined. This seriously annoyed the second group and they vowed revenge. They snuck up on the Mala's, killing several of them and chasing the rest of them 200 km to the south to a town now called Mala. To this day, there are no Malas near the rock, nor are there any wallabies. One of the huge features on the side of the rock is in the shape of a head and is the Mala leader warning all other Mala's to stay away and to head south to where the Mala's now live.

There are many stories such as this, and the typical story travels through different regions. When you hear the beginning of a story, you won't hear the ending in the same region. The rest of the story belongs to another region, and you must go there to hear the rest of the story, or perhaps even multiple regions. We thought this was very interesting, but we're glad that the ranger finished all of his stories.

The ranger also told us about the pida bowls that are taken from the bark of one of the local eucalyptus trees. The women score the bark and over a week, the bark comes off and then they heat it in a fire to curl it into the shape of the bowl and to harden it. There's a picture on the right of a tree that has a pida scar from years ago.

We also learned quite a bit about the rock and it's geological history. Over many, many years, there were inland seas that came and went. There was also sediment coming from mountains far to the east. Over time, the sediment was pressed into a huge sedimentary rock. Eventually, an earthquake pressed the rock up at an 85 degree angle. As such, only a small part of the rock is showing with an estimated 5-6 km in length underground.

Because we weren't hot and tired enough, we took yet another guide led walk to one of the watering holes. We heard a lot of the same stories of the first ranger, but perhaps with a slightly different perspective. The watering hole is fed from water running off Uluru, either from rain or from collective morning dew.

We also learned that Australia has somewhere close to 1,000,000 wild camels (although we haven't seen any). This is supposedly the largest population of wild camels in the world, and it's even more interesting since the camel isn't native to Australia. The camels were brought in when the western and northern portions of Australia were being settled. The camels function quite well in the Australian outback (apparently they don't mind the flies). They've been used as beasts of burden for exploring expeditions, building the railroad, gold mining and lots of things. Now apparently they're making quite a nuisance of themselves between eating up a lot of vegetation and dirtying-up a lot of watering holes.

By this time, there was danger that flies were going to carry one of us away so we headed back to the hotel for lunch and more pool time.

At 3PM, we started our afternoon tour to Kata Tjuta. This is another larger rock formation created in much the same way as Uluru. It was closer to the mountains and the rocks/sediment here were larger. When the earthquake happened, this formation was only shifted up about 15 degrees so it's a much wider formation with less underground. The composition of Kata Tjuta is quite different and there has been a lot of erosion over the years leaving 36 domes which looks something like heads. Kata Tjuta means "many heads" for the Aborigines. As it turns out, the Aborigines didn't have much need for numbers so really just had equivalents for one, two, three and many! It was a beautiful, clear afternoon (except for the flies) and the walk through the Olga's was quite nice. The guide on this tour was quite knowledgeable and provided good info on the geology as well as local plant life. As it turns out, many of the plants in Australia are dependent on fires to germinate!

After returning from Kata Tjuta, we had just 20 minutes before our bus for Sounds of Silence left. This is a dinner where they bus 60 or so people out into the middle of the outback for the evening. We started out with champagne and canapes accompanied by didgeridoo music (apparently the most un-played instrument in the world due to the number that are bought as souvenirs). After the sunset, we move down a hill to our tables which weren't visible earlier. We shared a table with three couples from the UK (two of the couples were on their honeymoons). Dinner was a buffet with lots of choices. After dinner but before dessert, they have an astronomer do a presentation on the southern sky. Obviously, some of what we see in the northern hemisphere isn't visible in the southern sky and it was interesting to learn about some of the things we can't typically see (not that we can see many stars at all in Houston). They also had 3 telescopes set up to look at various things. It was all quite interesting.

We really enjoyed the folks at our table and had a really nice evening. We made it back to the hotel about 11PM - so a very long day.

Thursday, January 8

Thursday morning, we headed to Sydney. More about that in our next update, but it included a bus, a plane, a train, a tram, and almost a monorail!